The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has a legislative mandate under Title 49 of the United States Code, Chapter 301, Motor Vehicle Safety, to issue Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) and Regulations to which manufacturers of motor vehicle and equipment items must conform and certify compliance. The overarching goal of the FMVSS is a reduction in both the number and the resultant severity of occupant injuries during a vehicle collision. Of these standards and regulations, FMVSS 201 in particular requires that passenger cars and certain other designated vehicles provide at least a specified minimal level of protection when a head of a vehicle occupant strikes or encounters a stationary structure within the vehicle interior. To facilitate such testing, model and/or dummy heads, commonly referred to as free motion headforms or FMH, are subjected to controlled impact testing in accordance with a rigid set of standards.
In order to comply with FMVSS 201, manufacturers enact precisely controlled internal testing procedures. Typically, to measure and evaluate the end effect of various simulated vehicle collisions, an FMH is connected to an impactor device, cylindrical piston, or launch arm and propelled toward a target point on a test surface. The targeted test surface is an interior structure or surface of a vehicle interior, e.g., a headliner, A-pillar, B-pillar, and the like. To ensure meaningful test data, the parameters for set up and execution of an FMVSS201 test should be precisely defined and repeatable. However, the process of positioning an FMH is somewhat involved, and positioning in a precise and repeatable manner can be difficult using conventional positioning tools and methodologies. As a result, some level of positional variation can be introduced during crash test set up by the bias and/or relative skill level of the individual operators, the equipment/tools used during the test setup, and the organizations responsible for conducting FMVSS201 tests for a given vehicle model.